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1. Differential Privacy Has Disparate Impact on Model Accuracy

   Bagdasaryan, Eugene; Poursaeed, Omid; Shmatikov, Vitaly (January 2019, Advances in neural information processing systems)

   null (Ed.)

   Differential privacy (DP) is a popular mechanism for training machine learning models with bounded leakage about the presence of specific points in the training data. The cost of differential privacy is a reduction in the model's accuracy. We demonstrate that in the neural networks trained using differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD), this cost is not borne equally: accuracy of DP models drops much more for the underrepresented classes and subgroups. For example, a gender classification model trained using DP-SGD exhibits much lower accuracy for black faces than for white faces. Critically, this gap is bigger in the DP model than in the non-DP model, i.e., if the original model is unfair, the unfairness becomes worse once DP is applied. We demonstrate this effect for a variety of tasks and models, including sentiment analysis of text and image classification. We then explain why DP training mechanisms such as gradient clipping and noise addition have disproportionate effect on the underrepresented and more complex subgroups, resulting in a disparate reduction of model accuracy. 

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2. Differential Privacy Has Disparate Impact on Model Accuracy

   Bagdasaryan, Eugene (January 2019, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 2019)

   Differential privacy (DP) is a popular mechanism for training machine learning models with bounded leakage about the presence of specific points in the training data. The cost of differential privacy is a reduction in the model's accuracy. We demonstrate that in the neural networks trained using differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD), this cost is not borne equally: accuracy of DP models drops much more for the underrepresented classes and subgroups. For example, a gender classification model trained using DP-SGD exhibits much lower accuracy for black faces than for white faces. Critically, this gap is bigger in the DP model than in the non-DP model, i.e., if the original model is unfair, the unfairness becomes worse once DP is applied. We demonstrate this effect for a variety of tasks and models, including sentiment analysis of text and image classification. We then explain why DP training mechanisms such as gradient clipping and noise addition have disproportionate effect on the underrepresented and more complex subgroups, resulting in a disparate reduction of model accuracy. 

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3. DP-SGD-global-adapt-V2-S: Triad improvements of privacy, accuracy and fairness via step decay noise multiplier and step decay upper clipping threshold

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.elerap.2025.101476  

   Chilukoti, Sai Venkatesh; Hossen, Md Imran; Shan, Liqun; Tida, Vijay Srinivas; Bappy, Mahathir Mohammad; Tian, Wenmeng; Hei, Xiali (March 2025, Electronic Commerce Research and Applications)

   Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DP-SGD) has become a widely used technique for safeguarding sensitive information in deep learning applications. Unfortunately, DP-SGD’s per-sample gradient clipping and uniform noise addition during training can significantly degrade model utility and fairness. We observe that the latest DP-SGD-Global-Adapt’s average gradient norm is the same throughout the training. Even when it is integrated with the existing linear decay noise multiplier, it has little or no advantage. Moreover, we notice that its upper clipping threshold increases exponentially towards the end of training, potentially impacting the model’s convergence. Other algorithms, DP-PSAC, Auto-S, DP-SGD-Global, and DP-F, have utility and fairness that are similar to or worse than DP-SGD, as demonstrated in experiments. To overcome these problems and improve utility and fairness, we developed the DP-SGD-Global-Adapt-V2-S. It has a step-decay noise multiplier and an upper clipping threshold that is also decayed step-wise. DP-SGD-Global-Adapt-V2-S with a privacy budget of 1 improves accuracy by 0.9795%, 0.6786%, and 4.0130% in MNIST, CIFAR10, and CIFAR100, respectively. It also reduces the privacy cost gap by 89.8332% and 60.5541% in unbalanced MNIST and Thinwall datasets, respectively. Finally, we develop mathematical expressions to compute the privacy budget using truncated concentrated differential privacy (tCDP) for DP-SGD-Global-Adapt-V2-T and DP-SGD-Global-Adapt-V2-S. 

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4. Scaling up Differentially Private Deep Learning with Fast Per-Example Gradient Clipping

   https://doi.org/10.2478/popets-2021-0008  

   Lee, Jaewoo; Kifer, Daniel (January 2021, Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies)

   null (Ed.)

   Abstract Recent work on Renyi Differential Privacy has shown the feasibility of applying differential privacy to deep learning tasks. Despite their promise, however, differentially private deep networks often lag far behind their non-private counterparts in accuracy, showing the need for more research in model architectures, optimizers, etc. One of the barriers to this expanded research is the training time — often orders of magnitude larger than training non-private networks. The reason for this slowdown is a crucial privacy-related step called “per-example gradient clipping” whose naive implementation undoes the benefits of batch training with GPUs. By analyzing the back-propagation equations we derive new methods for per-example gradient clipping that are compatible with auto-differeniation (e.g., in Py-Torch and TensorFlow) and provide better GPU utilization. Our implementation in PyTorch showed significant training speed-ups (by factors of 54x - 94x for training various models with batch sizes of 128). These techniques work for a variety of architectural choices including convolutional layers, recurrent networks, attention, residual blocks, etc. 

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5. Understanding Clipping for Federated Learning: Convergence and Client-Level Differential Privacy

   Xinwei Zhang; Xiangyi Chen; Mingyi Hong; Zhiwei Steven Wu; Jinfeng Yi (July 2022, International Conference on Machine Learning)

   Providing privacy protection has been one of the primary motivations of Federated Learning (FL). Recently, there has been a line of work on incorporating the formal privacy notion of differential privacy with FL. To guarantee the client-level differential privacy in FL algorithms, the clients’ transmitted model updates have to be clipped before adding privacy noise. Such clipping operation is substantially different from its counterpart of gradient clipping in the centralized differentially private SGD and has not been well-understood. In this paper, we first empirically demonstrate that the clipped FedAvg can perform surprisingly well even with substantial data heterogeneity when training neural networks, which is partly because the clients’ updates become similar for several popular deep architectures. Based on this key observation, we provide the convergence analysis of a differential private (DP) FedAvg algorithm and highlight the relationship between clipping bias and the distribution of the clients’ updates. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that rigorously investigates theoretical and empirical issues regarding the clipping operation in FL algorithms. 

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